On Apr 30, 3:40*pm, (Dave Platt) wrote:
In article ,
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

Preparing for a move and significant downsizing, I am going through my old
disks and finding about half are no longer useable.

Seriously if you are into ham radio you know that as of Jan 1, 2013 it will
be illegal for nonhams to use wideband (25kHz channel spacing) two way
radios in the US.

That depends on the band.

The FCC has just announced that it is going to waive the "You must
narrow-band your systems" requirement, for licensees whose systems are
operating in the "T" block (the 470-512 MHz range).

These licensees are going to have to vacate this band within the next
ten years or so anyhow... and the FCC has agreed that it doesn't make
sense for the licensees to have to buy new narrow-band systems that
they'd have to abandon after only a few years.

This means there are lots of radios coming on the surplus market which were
made in the 1990's. They are programed using DOS software, which will not
run on a modern computer, or under any version of Windows.

True! *People are resorting to the use of old junker AT-bus PCs, or
running the DOS softare under Qemu or a similar virtual machine (often
with a "slow down, damnit!" tweak).

--
Dave Platt * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: *http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
* I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
* * *boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Still have a pair pf AMD Athlon XP 3200 machines that can run MS-DOS
6.22 in all its glory. Old Tango PCB ran like a tornado. Also a
Pentium 166 and a K6-2 550. The Pentium actually gets fired up now and
then for the JDR universal programmer to fix old Tek TV scopes.

G²